Structural Biology

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Denis Burdakov group

Neural circuits, instincts, sleep, appetite

Powerful instinctive drives such as appetite and alertness are vital for functional and competitive adaptive behaviour. Their malfunction also causes some of the most frequent diseases, such as obesity and sleep disorders, affecting around 1:4 people worldwide. We study function and malfunction of instincts at many levels of analysis, from cells to behavior.

A particular focus is on hypothalamic neurons which send axons throughout the brain, and on global control implied by these projections. By viewing instincts as control loops automated through learning or inheritance, we explore the logic and neural implementation of instinctive action. Since control systems compute predictive and corrective actions based on changes in environment, we are also interested in neurophysiology of computation.